An Open Trade Blockchain (OTB), was just launched in Singapore—the region’s first cross-border blockchain platform that is intended to align with China’s Belt Road Initiative.

The Belt Road Initiative is China’s ambitious bid to become more technologically interconnected with the world, primarily through a joint effort to grow infrastructure across many different countries.

It was launched by Global eTrade Services (GeTS), a subsidiary of CrimsonLogic, a provider of eGovernment products in Singapore.

When GeTS was launched a year ago, it amassed more than 10 million transactions in its first year of operation. Today, it conducts 13 million transactions valued at more than USD 400 billion in the first half of 2018.

The OTB is an extendable blockchain service that was built to help trading communities boost efficiency, security, and transparency in global trades.

Facilitating Immutable Business Deals

The OTB is a permission blockchain network (meaning one needs permission to access the information on the network), which is run on nodes that are hosted by whitelisted accredited trade compliance companies.

According to GeTS, “OTB enhances the security of trade-related documents, from Certificate of Origin to Commercial Invoice and enhances the transparency and trust between shippers, freight-forwarders, and customers”.

The OTB was designed with intuitiveness and user-friendliness in mind, so that any company, tech-savvy or not, can still utilise the platform. For example, the OTB was built with drag-and-drop functions when businesses are securing trade documents between each other. On top of that, Web Service APIs are also made available to allow businesses to integrate the OTB with their own existing systems.

GeTS designed the OTB to be an open infrastructure—this means that anyone can use it as building blocks to build new services on top of it.

One example they provided is how an electronic Bill of Lading (list of a ship’s cargo) can be developed to help the ecosystem become more efficient, rather than the existing, cumbersome norm.

The Project Is Still Underway

Currently, GeTS is still assisting partners to progressively provision the blockchain nodes. These include partners such as China-ASEAN Information Harbor Co., Suzhou Cross-E-commerce Co.Ltd (operator of the Suzhou E-commerce Single Window), and Commodities Intelligence Centre (a joint-venture company between ZALL SMARTCOM—a major B2B player in China, GeTS and SGX), just to name a few.

The goal is to provide an extensive blokchain network across Asia, which will, as per the Belt Road Initiative, link China to the rest of the region.

The Southern Transport Corridor here refers to a network of railways that will link Congqing to Guangxi in south-eastern China, and once completed, should provide a shorter and more direct trade route between China and Southeast Asia.

Eugene hopes that the OTB will set a new precedent for global trade.

“Trade volume between ASEAN and China would become the single largest transaction between two regions and we hope to facilitate this.”

Mr. Chong Kok Keong, CEO of Global eTrade Services (GeTS) said,

Chong Kok Keong

“We are now linked up to 24 Customs nodes across the world, with more than 175,000 connected parties, continuing to improve time savings by 60% and increase productivity by 1.5 times for our customers.

“We see tremendous potential in the open infrastructure of OTB, and I encourage the global trade and other communities to build blockchain services on OTB to better create a more transparent and secure environment for businesses.”